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Chicago, Birthplace of May Day and the 8-Hour Day
By Beatrice Lumpkin
Can be won, can be won; Single stones will form an arch, One by one, one by one. And, by union, what we will Can be all accomplished still. Drops of water turn a mill, Singly none, singly none. This 1870s miners’ poem sings of the spirit of unity and forecasts Labor’s eventual triumph. It was this spirit that brought workers out in 1,600 cities in the US to march on May 1, 1876. The marchers demanded an 8-Hour Day with no cut in pay. The work day at that time was 10 to 12 hours, 6 days a week, for about $1 a day. The employers’ view of the 8-Hour Day was described in a few words by “Mr. Surgeon Green” of St. Thomas Hospital. Eight hours’ work, eight hours’ sleep, and eight hours’ recreation, is the allotment of twenty-four, which seems most agreeable to nature to some of them, for adults. But to the great majority of employers of all kinds of labour, such a humane division of the day must seem very preposterous. For as man was born to trouble, as the sparks fly upwards, so, according to their creed, was he born to labour, as the sweat drops downwards. Are not the poor, the “working classes?” Then let them work─ work─work. If they are to rest hours and hours on week days, pray what is the use of the Sabbath? Work is the Chief End and whole Duty of Man. Milwaukee Tragedy Most of the May Day Marches went peacefully. In some cities, however, employers and government violently attacked the movement. Milwaukee was one of the cities where employers used deadly violence against workers who were striking for the 8-hour day. The March for the 8-Hour Day was massive in Milwaukee on May 1st, 1886. Thousands participated. After the March, hundreds went to Milwaukee factories to spread the strike for the 8-Hour Day. By May 2, workers had shut down every factory but the Rolling Mills in Bay View. On May 3, the 8-hour-day strikers marched to the Mills. They picked up more marchers along the way, swelling their numbers to 1500. The strikers were mainly Polish, some German, and some Native American. Two hundred yards from the Bay View Mills, the marchers were met by the State Militia. The Militia had orders to “shoot to kill,” and kill they did. They killed Frank Kunkel, Frank Nowarczyk, John Marsh, Robert Erdman, Johann Zaska, Martin Jankowiak, Michael Ruchalski and two unidentified Polish immigrants. After the massacre, many employers began to fire Polish workers “because the Polish people were too radical.” However, the citizens of Milwaukee sympathized with the 8-Hour Day strikers. Voters were outraged by the massacre. The 1888 elections replaced county and city government officials with Socialists. Socialist mayors were elected in Milwaukee and served many terms. Haymarket Massacre in Chicago It was the massacre in Chicago’s Haymarket Square that brought world attention to the 8-Hour Day struggle in the United States. On May 1. 1886, workers put on the largest march in Chicago’s history. The streets were full of the sounds of the 8-hour-day song: We mean to make things over, we are tired of toil for naught, With but bare enough to live upon, and never an hour for thought, We want to feel the sunshine, and we want to smell the flowers, We are sure that God has will’d it, and we mean to have eight hours. We’re summoning our forces from shipyard, shop and mill, Eight hours for work, eight hour for rest, eight hours for what we will! Eight hours for work, eight hour for rest, eight hours for what we will! The 8-Hour Day March was peaceful, even festive. But on that day, there was trouble at McCormick’s Reaper Plant. Thousands had been locked out for demanding an 8-hour-day. A workers’ rally outside the plant was attacked by police. Some workers were killed. To protest the killings, a rally was called for May 4th in Haymarket Square. Mayor Harrison attended the rally and all was peaceful. Contrary to the Mayor’s wishes, Police Captain John Bonfield brought hundreds of police to the rally. After the Mayor rode off on his white horse, unknown persons threw a bomb into the crowd. The police began to fire wildly. Eight policemen and at least as many workers were killed. Severe repression, fed by media hysteria, followed the massacre. The police made hundreds of arrests. Eight workers’ leaders were held for trial. Despite worldwide protests, four were executed on the gallows: Albert Parsons, August Spies, George Engel and Adolph Fischer. The four Martyrs had been sentenced to death in a flagrantly flawed trial. For example, the judge invited “Society debutantes” to sit on the bench with him and flirted with them during the trial. May 1st, International Workers Day The heroism of the Martyrs inspired workers around the world. In 1891, the Socialist International declared May Day as International Workers Day, in honor of the Haymarket Martyrs. Since that time, working families all over the world celebrate May Day, the holiday devoted to the workers’ cause. I watched the big May Day March in New York, in 1923. I had a good view. I was still small enough to be hoisted up on my father’s shoulders. It was fun to look at the thousands of happy marchers dressed in their best clothes. I remember a sea of signs: the hat-makers, the dressmakers, the pocketbook makers, dressmakers, men’s clothing workers, the printers, plumbers, on and on. Everyone was a maker, a worker. Then it began to rain. “It’s raining, papa,” I said, “Let’s go home.” “Wait just a while,” he answered. The rain kept coming down and the marchers continued to march. Their hair got wet and the paint on their signs began to run. I did not fully understand what was going on but I was impressed. “This must be very, very important.” I thought. “Otherwise people would never march in the rain.” I marched every year after that, until the marches fell victim to anti-Communist hysteria and the Cold War. Only a few people in the USA renained aware of the May Day tradition. That changed on May 1, 2007. On that day, millions of immigrants brought May Day back to the United States. The immigrants marched for their rights on May 1st in 2007 and 2008. In a way, that is a poetic restoration of our history. In 1886, most of the fighters for the 8-Hour Day were immigrants, too. Thanks to research by William Adelman, and a college paper by my grandson, I learned how modern Chicago was built by immigrants. Immigrants Built Chicago Chicago of the 19th century was built by immigrants. The Irish came in the 1830s and 1840s, and the Germans came after the defeat of the 1848 Revolution in Germany. After these workers began to organize and fight for their rights, employers brought in Czech, Bohemian, Polish and other European workers. Employers hoped the newer arrivals would be more docile. Germans in Chicago remembered the horrible morning of April 21, 1855. They had marched from their Milwaukee Avenue neighborhood, intending to protest at City Hall. The beer halls that served as German social gathering places were closing because their license fees had been raised from $30 to $300. As the marchers were crossing the Clark Avenue Bridge over the Chicago River, Mayor Boone ordered the bridge turned. The marchers on the bridge were trapped. Then the police opened fire, wounding many and killing one. Chicago Fire and Immigrant Workers Immigrants suffered severely in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. Of the hundreds who died and the 100.000 left homeless, most were immigrants from Europe. The victims looked to the city for help. A half billion dollars (in today’s terms) had been donated for relief by workers around the world. But only a trickle of the funds reached the victims of the fire. The Relief operation had been privatized, turned over to the mayor’s business friends in the Chicago Relief and Aid Society. Homeless and hungry, the unemployed workers marched on the Relief Society on December, 1872. The marchers were herded by the police into the tunnel under the River at La Salle Street. Both ends of the tunnel were then closed by the police. The marchers were trapped. The police charged into the tunnel, clubs swinging. Several demonstrators were killed and many were injured. Later investigation showed that the business men in charge of the Relief and Aid had used the funds for private gain. They had borrowed huge sums at no interest, pocketing what they saved over borrowing from banks. Nothing was left for the Fire victims. Unfortunately, this type of thievery has not stopped to this day. Thoughts of the mistreatment of New Orleans flood victims come to mind. The suffering of the Fire victims deepened during the 1873 recession. Hungry people flocked to the Relief and Aid Society again, to demand food. Minutes of the Society’s Board of Directors shows the Director’s unfeeling response: "Mr. King, Prest., stated that he had called this meeting to consider what action could be taken to relieve the Society of the crowd thronging the building and streets demanding relief, the majority of them unworthy and impostors." To keep people away from its doors, the Board asked for written applications and a recommendation from "some well known citizen." The Board added, single, able-bodied men would get no help. Railroad Strike of 1877 In 1886, Chicago was only 50 years old. It already had a rich labor history, bloodied by anti-labor police violence. That history can help us understand the background of the Haymarket Massacre. Labor Historian Adelman wrote, “The rich of Chicago felt that the world was coming to an end and their way of life about to be destroyed.” As Mother Jones pointed out in her autobiography, the working class was “in rebellion” in all of the industrial centers of the country.” This was especially true of Chicago, the scene of one great strike after another. The Railroad Strike of 1877 and the Streetcar Strike of 1885 set the stage for the Chicago Haymarket Massacre of 1886. Chicago was deeply affected by the National Railroad Strike of 1877. The strike had a big impact on Albert Parsons who became a key figure in the Haymarket Tragedy ten years later. One of the big issues of the 1877 strike was safety, especially for the brakemen who had the most dangerous jobs. The brakemen coupled cars together. “They had to stand between two cars being coupled so that they might steer link into socket and then let fall the pin that joined them.” The dangerous moment was when the cars came together. Hundreds were killed and thousands injured every year. It was so bad that a new brakeman was recognized by the fact that he still had all ten fingers. Was this carnage of railroad workers just a necessary cost of connecting the states by railroads? One commentator said, “As long as brakes cost more than brakemen, we may expect that the present sacrificial method of car coupling to be continued.” But workers answered a loud “NO!” to the question, “Do brakemen have to die?” They went on strike in West Virginia, fighting for safety and other issues. The strike spread to Chicago on July 23, 1877 and soon paralyzed the city. After the Michigan Central Railroad workers walked out of the yards at Randolph and Michigan, workers began walking out all over Chicago. Streetcars on the South Side stopped running. Ships did not move because seamen were on strike. That evening 8,000 workers came to Market Square for a torchlight rally. Albert Parsons gave a speech that electrified the rally. Parsons urged working men to join the Workingmen’s Party. He called for use of the ballot to win state control of transportation and to take key sectors of the economy “out of the hands or control of private individuals, corporations, monopolists and syndicates. Today we would say that Parsons was calling for nationalization. More, since he wanted control to be in the hands of the people, he was calling for Socialism. The speech united both ethnic and native born workers in a new way. But the speech did not go over that well with Parson’s employer, the Chicago Times. Parsons, a typesetter, was fired and blacklisted. When he applied for a job at the Chicago Tribune, thugs threw him down two flights of stairs. He persisted in his search for a job, applying at the ethnic newspapers. Some plainclothesmen sent Parsons to City Hall, then in the Rookery building at Adams and LaSalle. There, Parsons was met by the police and fifty members of the Board of Trade. They told him, “Leave town or you’ll be strung up on a lamp post!” Despite a maximum effort by workers to win the strike, the Railroad Strike of 1877 was drowned in a sea of employer-state violence. Over 100 people, mostly strikers, were killed. In Chicago, Federal troops and the Illinois National Guard were used to crush the strikers. The Federal troops came from the Dakotas. They had just massacred the Sioux in revenge for the death of General Custer. A headline in the Chicago Times in 1877 voiced the capitalists’ anxious outrage: "Terrors Reign, The Streets of Chicago Given Over to Howling Mobs of Thieves and Cutthroats." Big Business owners kept the anti-labor hysteria going. Marshall Field armed the clerks in his store and gave his delivery wagons to the troops to move armed forces around the city. Streetcar Strike of 1885 Company-State violence against strikers was used again in the 1885 Chicago Streetcar Strike that year. The streetcar workers demanded shorter hours and an end to discrimination against union members. The company’s reply was to fire sixteen of the union leaders. In the strike that followed, Chicago Mayor Carter Harrison told the police to stay out of it and let company and workers settle it between them. But Police Captain Bonfield cared nothing for the Mayor’s orders. He offered the police as strikebreakers. The Pinkerton Detective Agency also offered their men as strikebreakers—for a fee. Rather than give the workers their demands, the Streetcar Company preferred to pay huge fees for strikebreakers. On July 1, the stage was set for a confrontation. The company sent out its streetcars run by Pinkerton detectives and Captain Bonfield’s police. They were met at the corner of Madison and Halsted by a crowd of men, women and children. Many of the crowd were in support of the strikers. Others were there because they were angry with the company for overcharging passengers and refusing to give transfers. The confrontation was bloody. The police clubbed everyone in sight. That included storekeepers who stepped out to the sidewalk to see what was going on. Five days later, the company agreed to accept Mayor Harrison’s offer of arbitration. But Captain Bonfield would have none of it. He led 400 policemen out to the West Side and ordered them to “shoot to kill.” He personally “shot to kill” a worker who was stoning a strikebreaker-driven street car. Fortunately, Bonfield’s aim was bad and he missed. [Adelman, 10] Haymarket Massacre Setback The next year, Bonfield played a similarly vile role at the Haymarket Massacre. As mentioned above, Bonfield disobeyed the Mayor’s orders again. He massed 200 police at the relatively small and peaceful rally in Haymarket Square. When unknown persons threw a bomb into the crowd, wild police fire killed eight workers and eight policemen. The repression that followed, including the execution of the Haymarket Martyrs, set the 8-Hour Day movement back for decades. Still, the 8-Hour Day issue did not go away as the 19th century ended. In 1918, the 8-Hour Day was a key demand of the packinghouse workers. Under threat of a national strike, a federal arbitrator granted the 8-Hour Day for the meatpackers. The 8-Hour Day was also the central demand of the National Steel Strike of 1919. But as late as the summer of 1933, I worked 10-hour days on my first job. Ten hours and sometimes twelve were still standard at that time. It was not until 1938 that we won the 8-Hour Day. Under pressure from the new CIO-led coalition, Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act. The eight-hour day finally became a reality. This Act also established minimum pay and outlawed child labor. In recent times, progressives have demanded a shorter work week and the 6-Hour Day. Since 1886, my guess is that productivity has increased hundreds or thousand-fold. But instead of a shorter work week, people are now asking, “Whatever happened to the 8-Hour Day?” According to The NY Times, Jan. 31, 2009, “Americans Lead the World in Hours Worked.” As we fight for massive public works job projects, we can draw inspiration from our Chicago Haymarket Martyrs. Fight for a shorter work week and higher minimum wage! |
